Children can become better communicators by expressing their thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Effective communication through speech or writing enables children to successfully convey their messages. When teaching writing to children, educators often look to writing traits--ideas, organization, word choice, voice, sentence fluency, conventions--to…

Courses: This semester-long assignment can be featured in undergraduate or graduate communication courses that include a major writing assignment such as research methods, capstone classes, senior thesis sections, or advanced courses on topics such as interpersonal, intercultural, and interracial communication. This assignment is suitable for…

Writer's checklists are evidence-based procedural facilitators that prompt students to actively engage in the writing process. Students with diverse learning needs experience problems when composing texts because of the complex steps involved. To write effectively, students must focus on understanding prompts; setting goals; generating,…

Teaching students in upper elementary school to revise their papers effectively requires a three-pronged approach. First, teachers provide instruction on a relevant genre or writing form (using the Common Core State Standards for English language arts or other relevant standards as a guide). Second, teachers help students to use four basic…

To achieve widespread, well-received knowledge dissemination, scientific writing must be precise, persuasive, and presentable. Thus, by definition, haiku writing is a logical choice by which to introduce young learners to effective scientific writing. In its traditional form, "haiku" is a Japanese poem intended for comparing imagery in…

This book clearly explains what Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD) are, and describes the symptoms of conditions most commonly encountered in the mainstream classroom: dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADHD, and OCD. The author provides an overview of the strengths and weaknesses commonly associated with…

For many secondary students, writing effectively is the most elusive of the critical literacy skills needed for college and career readiness. And for many teachers, revision is the most difficult part of the writing process to tackle. How can adolescent writers be guided to revisit their work, to identify the weaknesses in their writing drafts,…

Use formative assessment to dramatically improve your students' writing. In "Successful Student Writing Through Formative Assessment", educator and international speaker Harry G. Tuttle shows you how to guide middle and high school students through the prewriting, writing, and revision processes using formative assessment techniques that work.…

In this book, the author provides teachers with detailed strategies and lesson plans, along with real student writing samples. He describes effective routines of formative self-assessment, and shows teachers how to form a professional learning team with their colleagues using the 6-session professional learning guide. Contents include: (1)…

Argues that by closely examining, editing, and rewriting actual autobiographical texts, students can learn how their own writer-oriented materials can be transformed into reader-oriented materials. (RAE)

A teacher shares her technique for improving student writing: add detail. Forget organization, cutting, and adding more information. Get students to focus only on adding more detail to information already included. Examples are given. (MT)

Presents a program for effective revision procedures based on five criteria: amount/kind of detail, appropriate emphasis of content, logical progression, stylistic appropriateness, and mechanical accuracy. (PD)

Suggests an alternative to traditional revising for basic writers. Describes how "interrupted" writing assignments can reveal students' writing processes. (MM)

Recommends that teachers concentrate on explaining explicit procedures for revising style, because many novice writers interpret revision as only proofreading for typing or spelling errors. Provides a set of guidelines for stylistic revision that help students identify problems with passive verbs, nominalizations, wordiness and imprecise language.…

Suggests the distinction between reseeing and rewriting is the difference between substitution and combination. Claims that the epistemic approach imagines composition as a process through which the writer might learn something, and sees texts as indeterminate, open to further interpretation. (MS)